Wednesday, January 24, 2018

WOW Stripe Abandons Bitcoin

This is big.

Stripe, a San Francisco-based payment processor for more than 100,000 businesses, said yesterday that it will stop processing bitcoin transactions on April 23. Stripe product manager Tom Karlo said the firm, which has accepted bitcoin for payments since 2014, had hoped the digital coin would become a “universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions” that helps users in places where credit cards are less available or too expensive.

He said that Bitcoin was becoming less useful for payments and that transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions.

Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with bitcoin makes sense, he said, therefore, starting today, we are winding down support for bitcoin payments.

"Transaction processing difficulties," is one of the four pillars that I previoulsy identified as potentially causing problems for bitcoin.